About
Catherine Wagner Minnery
When a very young Catherine Wagner Minnery’s family visited a hill top park in Cincinnati, Ohio, to see the flooded Ohio River, she remembers seeing a modest house, painted a pale turquoise blue, tilted off its foundation, surrounded by muddy water. “I was very young, it was in the 1950‘s, and I was amazed by all the water and the houses submerged! But that one block of blue surrounded by the creamy brown of the muddy Ohio River, is what really stuck in my mind. I could never think about that experience without recalling the blue of that unfortunate house. Maybe that was an early inkling of my life long pursuit of color”.
At this time she and her siblings and parents lived next door to her maternal grandparents farm, just outside the Cincinnati city limits. It was an idyllic place and the colors, textures and smells associated with that place gave her an early appreciation of the natural beauty that surrounds us all. Sadly, the farm was sold after the death of her grandfather, but her family’s home was there and she remained physically connected to what was left of this special place until she was a young adult.
Her formal art education started at the University of Cincinnati where she was a design student with the vague idea of pursuing a degree in fashion design. Her first year drawing instructor convinced her that her talents lay more in the field of fine art. So in the middle of her second year of study, she left the university and started her studies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She graduated with a fine arts certificate and later finished her academic degree at the University of Cincinnati evening college.
After graduation she obtained several positions in the field of advertising eventually working as an Art Director for a fashion shoe manufacturer. Along the way she married a fellow art student who had changed his major to architecture and when he graduated, they moved to South Dakota, where he started his career. Two more moves followed; to Mississippi and eventually upstate New York, where she freelanced as a graphic designer and illustrator while being a mother to three children. Knowing that eventually she would “get back into my own work”, it was her father’s illness and death, in 1986, that pushed her to find time to paint. A week‘s landscape painting workshop, with painters David Rohn, Marjorie Portnow and Richard Sheehan, at The Vermont Studio Center, turned out to be a great place for her to reacquaint herself with her early passion. Once back home she painted or drew any time she could, working plein air. Eventually painting dominated her creative pursuits and her design business efforts were replaced with other occupations, waitressing, lay ministry and retail sales. Gradually her work was shown more and collectors bought.
She has lived in the area of Saratoga Springs, NY since 1990. MInnery’s studio is in Schenectady, NY where she creates from photos and studies drawn and or painted on site. Its rare that a piece will be completed on site but working in the landscape is necessary to her landscape focused art. Time spent studying the landscape is absolutely essential. Revisiting the subject in the studio, she feels, helps her focus on the hidden essence of what first inspired her while in the landscape, recalling her memory or emotional response in order for her creation to be as personal as possible. This way of working has been years in the making and she likes painter Paul Klee’s creative credo, ”Art does not replicate what we see; rather it makes us see.”
“I am constantly inspired by the natural world,” she states, “the sunrises and sunsets, the ordinary upstate NY landscape that I see on a daily basis.
Of course, I also am deeply moved by the majestic; the dramatic rivers and streams and mountains that are part of this landscape and the underlying abstract and spiritual components of this and any subject matter (other locales, interiors, still lifes or some combination). I create art because I have a need to make visual the excitement I felt when I first looked at (or thought about) the subject at hand, searching for the unseen, not just the surface reality.” Like the excitement and wonder that she felt when seeing the blue house surrounded by muddy water and the idyllic day to day hours playing in the fields and barns of her grandparents farm.
As for the material she prefers, she works primarily in oil, but also enjoys working with watercolor and charcoal. “My charcoal work consists of strong contrasts and shapes. My watercolor work is direct and loose....not tightly rendered. I know that the drawings and the watercolors instruct and inform my oil pieces.”
Awards, exhibits and special opportunities:
In February 2013, Minnery was awarded Best in Show at the Albany Center Gallery’s Project Art in Albany NY. And in 2010, Minnery participated in the Albany NY Institute of History and Art’s “Tomorrow’s Masters Today” exhibit in which her painting was one of ten to be designated as part of the Master Class. In February 2008, Minnery exhibited large contemplative drawings of water and streams at the Mikhail Zakin Gallery in Demarest NJ. In 2002, she traveled to Rwanda, Africa with Catholic Relief Services and produced a body of work from that experience.
In 2001, she, along with Saratoga Springs artist, Anne Diggory, were part of the New York Times, "In Art's Footsteps"; a 10 part series that revisited locations illuminated by the Hudson River Artists. (The NY Times article is copied below.)
She was a member of the artist run, cooperative gallery, Piermont Flywheel
Gallery, Piermont NY, for 15 years where she showed regularly. Her work is featured in galleries in the northeastern US.
Her work is included in museum, corporate and private collections.
A Summer Series (2001)
The paintings of the Hudson River School are portraits of the Northeast, captured at a time when 19th-century America was re-examining its ideas about nature. The landscapes helped spur tourism, forestry and environmentalism.
This is the third of 10 summer articles in which The New York Times returns to the places illuminated by Hudson River School artists. In the fourth article, the residents of Hudson, N.Y., mull over a proposal for a new cement plant that would mar a view of Mount Marino that artists have been painting for over a century. In a place where American art and industry grew up together, can they still coexist?
June 20, 2001
IN ART'S FOOTSTEPS: The Evolving Eye
Paints in Tow, in Pursuit of the Flume By KIRK JOHNSON
Smithsonian American Art Museum ``The Flume, Opalescent River,
Adirondacks,'' by Alexander Helwig Wyant
EWCOMB, N.Y. — It was nearly 4p.m. by the time they saw the distinctive white rocks along the Opalescent River, suggesting that the goal was finally at hand. But Catherine Minnery's legs were aching by then after more than six hours on the trail, and the strong afternoon sunlight — though perfect for painting — was about to fade. The muddy, root-strewn hike back to camp would be treacherous after dark. Time was running out.
"I think we're getting close," Anne Diggory said more than once.
The plan had sounded simple enough, and the early June weather, after a week of drenching rains across the Adirondacks, had turned fair. So with three days' worth of dehydrated food and painting supplies in their packs, the little group — Ms. Diggory and Ms. Minnery, both artists and close friends from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Ms. Diggory's daughter Ariel — had left the trailhead that morning just outside the High Peaks Wilderness Area. They were out to bag the Flume.
The Flume is both a literal place and a figurative one, and perhaps, in the end, that was the nub of their journey. The spot is marked in a general way on hiking maps, about three miles from Mount Marcy near the headwaters of the Hudson River, a stretch of sheer rock canyon with many waterfalls and rapids. But "The Flume" is also a stylized artistic construction: a quietly contemplative painting by Alexander Helwig Wyant, who came here in the 1870's as he recovered from a stroke that left him partly paralyzed.
For these modern-day artists, one of the great questions about returning to the Flume — a trek that Ms. Diggory had thought about for more than a decade since discovering the painting in a book of Hudson River School art — was not so much whether it would look the same, but whether it could possibly feel the same. She'd fallen in love, in particular, with the painting's sense of enclosure, and the mazelike progression of white stone and water that leads the eye into the painting, up the rock wall, and back down.
"That's one of the things I think about when I think about previous artists," said Ms. Diggory, 50, who has been hiking and camping in these woods since childhood. "Can you go back? How much has vision — my vision — changed from his vision?" she said. "Can I see what he saw?"
How Wyant saw the world himself only adds to the mystery. He'd painted with his right hand as a younger man, but by the time he came to the Adirondacks in his 40's, he'd been forced to change to his left. He painted using a different side of his brain, and "The Flume" is among the first major works he produced in what increasingly became a looser, more Impressionistic style.
But now, as the day wore on, Ms. Diggory was beginning to wonder if she'd get a chance to see anything. The deep snows in the Adirondacks last winter were still melting, and the river was high, with a steep embankment that allowed little possibility of safely reaching the water's edge. About 4:30 p.m., Ms. Minnery, 51, an artist and youth minister at a Roman Catholic church in Saratoga, gave up and decided to stay below to paint on the edge of Lake Colden.
"I'm wimping out," she said. "Besides, it's all beautiful here. I'll be very happy."
Ms. Diggory pushed on, using a double-
Librado Romero/The New York Times :Ms. Minnery paused along the Opalescent River to sketch studies for future studio work.
Librado Romero/The New York Times : With watercolors and paintbrushes in their packs, Catherine Minnery, left, Ariel Diggory, center, and Anne Diggory spent hours on the trail in the Adirondacks.
I
Wyant's painting from its weather-sealed bag and began showing it to other hikers, asking them whether they'd seen a perspective like this, somewhere further up or down the river.
"I feel like we're looking for a lost child, the little boy on the milk carton," she said.
The passers-by on the Opalescent, many returning from a climb up Mount Marcy — with the slow tread of exhaustion to prove it — just shrugged and looked blank.
Mystery of Artistic Vision
How any artist sees the world is a mystery. A few years ago, Ms. Diggory deliberately tried to create a painting in the manner of the old Hudson River School and couldn't. The conventions about what defined a 19th- century landscape, especially the wide-eyed sentimentality about nature, couldn't be duplicated in these jaded, self-referential times without appearing to be a parody, she said.
But art historians say that to one degree or another every artist lives in the past. The Hudson River School painters essentially saw the world through the eyes of the 1700's, using landscape methods handed down from Europe. By the same measure, most artists today, however up to date they may seem, see the world through a lens dating from about the 1880's and 1890's, when new techniques and technologies in perspective and light were demolishing the old system.
"We're still very much in the grip of that avant-garde split in the late 19th century," said Kevin J. Avery, an associate curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
What happened to the artist's view of nature, experts like Mr. Avery say, was cumulative and unstoppable. Advances in photography made the old virtuoso realism of the Hudson River School seem irrelevant. New portable paint in tubes made finished art in the open air — a cornerstone of Impressionism — possible for the first time. Brighter pigments, like cobalt violet and cobalt yellow, first developed in the late 1850's, began to replace the somber browns of landscapes past. The closing of the American frontier pushed artists toward more intimate, personal views.
But perhaps the even greater mystery is how and why an artist connects with nature in the first place.
Ms. Diggory said she partly absorbed her sense of the landscape by going fishing with her father, David S. Parker. His idea of a vacation was to take the family across the country from New York to California and back, camping out every night of the way, under the stars if possible.
"He would fish and I would paint, and I learned that for a trout fisherman, it's not the catching, it's the patience and the style," she said. But she also learned that fishing and painting were related in other ways, too. Both were best in certain conditions: the morning and the evening. "I became
fascinated with light," she said.
(The family's devotion to the land has been inherited by Ariel Diggory, 22, who grew up backpacking with her parents in the Adirondacks. She graduated this spring with a degree in environmental studies from Middlebury College in Vermont.)
Ms. Minnery has always associated landscape painting with spirituality. She still vividly recalls the day about 15 years ago when she was painting along the Hudson River and became so absorbed that she didn't even notice when a tidal surge came along, raising the water level. It was up to her ankles and she hadn't even felt it.
"That was a real awakening to me," she said. "Whether it's spirit or God or whatever, it's overwhelming, and that's what painting is all about."
Some art experts believe that part of the historic split in seeing nature — the Hudson River School and everything after — was not so much about altered values or techniques, but rather about the modern, accelerated sense of time.
"My take on what's different between the 19th and 20th centuries is not so much what we look at, but how long we allow ourselves to look," said Scott MacDonald, a visiting professor of film at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.
In the Adirondacks, the shift in perspective about what a wilderness is and how it can best be preserved has changed everything. In the 19th century, scientists were unraveling the story of geology and rolling back the age of the earth, and that led artists to the view that wilderness was ancient and eternal, a rugged echo of deep time.
Today, conservationists regard wilderness areas as perhaps the most fragile ecosystems of all. Visitors to the Adirondacks High Peaks are reminded to carry out even organic wastes like orange peels to avoid altering animal diets, and to strain their cooking water through leaves or paper, and then carry out the paper. Rangers berate hikers to stay on the trails, muddy or not, to avoid contributing to erosion.
View From the Flume
It was nearly 5:30 by the time Ms. Diggory found a way to reach the edge of the Opalescent and clamber out onto the rocks, holding her image of Wyant before her. It was not the exact spot where Wyant had stood, but it was close. The high left wall was a perfect match, as were the three boulders at the bottom. Perhaps because he'd come later in the season, or in a drier year, he'd been able to get past the deep river pool that was just ahead and so take in the scene from there.
Hastily, as the light began to fade, she sketched what she could. She'd already made a drawing from the top of the Flume looking down, and now Ariel was looking at her watch, gently suggesting that it was time to give up and head back to camp.
Already, though, Ms. Diggory's head was filled with new artistic vistas.
She began toying with the idea of what she called a cabinet painting, with the original Wyant image on the inside, and her own repainting of the scene on a transparency on top of it; old vision and the new, together. She began to think that a painting from the top would be interesting. And she began making plans to go back. Even if art hadn't quite happened at the Flume, because of the time and the physical barriers to reaching Wyant's perspective, the ideas were flowing, she said, and maybe it was the attempt that mattered.
On Lake Colden, Ms. Minnery was dangling her legs from the dam and painting, her watercolor tubes and brushes spread out. She who had given up early had produced the most completely realized art of the day: a scene of Avalanche Pass, with Lake Colden in the foreground.
The next day dawned gray and misty, and the artists, who'd camped that night under one of the wooden shelters on the southern bank of the Opalescent, sat up in their sleeping bags for a long time, watching the sky brighten.
They chose not to hike any more. Ms. Minnery's legs were still sore, and Ms. Diggory wanted a full day with paper and paint. So the plan to seek out the site of another 19th-century painting, around Indian Pass, was abandoned. This day would be for making art, not finding it.
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